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Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

In the case of Chrome, you can't blame Google. They made a good browser, did some marketing and it got popular.

However the current situation is worrisome, because alternative implementations are dying and in the case of the web, diversity is important.

Both Opera and Microsoft's Edge are now powered by Chromium. Chromium is a project controlled by Google. Its redeeming quality, in terms of its open source nature, is the ability to fork, however competitors such as Microsoft proved that they no longer have the capacity to develop a modern browser.

At this point the only remaining alternatives are Firefox and Safari.

I think nowadays Firefox is a much better browser and that Mozilla is better at guarding my interests, so I would use Firefox even if it weren't a better browser, however the market isn't necessarily interested in that.

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"They made a good browser, did some marketing and it got popular."

They did make a good browser. However, their market share is not down to better browser or "some advertising." They use their other assets (search, youtube, android, docs..) to make chrome the "default" option.

It's a dominance breeds dominance cycle... a hallmark of modern monopoly.

Chrome wouldn't have gotten anywhere if it wasn't a very good browser. It is good. But, I don't think it could have been that kind of wipeout without leveraging google's greater web dominance.

There was a time when IE was a good browser and the default one. They dominated. A few years later, Mozilla had the better browser. Firefox slowly climbed to the middle, by being very good. They never got to 50% of the market.

IMO, during the IE6_v_FF days the feature and quality gap between browsers was at its highest. Much bigger than Chrome_v_FF ever was. Still Chrome today is far more dominant than FF or anything ever was... except IE in its monopoly day.

So they make good product.

Bing can be Edge only too.

If you search for Firefox, Google says "did you mean Chrome?"

Edited to add: This has actually happened to me when setting up a new Windows PC for someone.

That's fuel for a millions dollars lawsuit by the European Commission.

Billions, if at all.

The EC recently ruled against Google in a "slam dunk" case about anti-competitive contracts with "search partners." €1.5bn & it barely got noticed.

Just tried searching for 'firefox' as a quick test.

I do get a page of Firefox results, but I also get a box titled 'People also ask' after the first four results, with the very first item being; 'Is Mozilla Firefox Safe to Download?' I also get a box at the bottom of the page titled 'Web Browsers,' with the first item in that box being Chrome. And Firefox is just not in that box at all. Not a popular enough web browser to include in the box marked web browsers when searched for by name, it would seem. On the other hand, UC Browser makes the list after Chrome, Opera and Safari, which I hadn't even heard of until today, but is apparently by Alibaba.

> And Firefox is just not in that box at all.

If you search for Chrome, Chrome will not show up in that box either. And the first browser in that box is, guess what, Firefox. You just searched for it, why include it in the box?

UC Browser is pretty popular in Asia. Statcounter reports 3% market share worldwide, right between Samsung Internet and IE.

>If you search for Chrome, Chrome will not show up in that box either. And the first browser in that box is, guess what, Firefox. You just searched for it, why include it in the box?

Oh, good catch, you are right. Is just a bad title for the box and does not appear to be in any way nefarious. 'Other Web Browsers' would be a lot less confusing.

Am still cocking an eyebrow at 'Is Mozilla Firefox Safe to Download?' though.

It isn't safe to download for the person asking that question.

I'm not sure if anything changed in a day, but I'm not getting that result at all (in fact, I'm not getting a "did you mean Chrome" either). The latter isn't explainable by me, but for the former... well, remember the search results are tailored to you (that's another pandora's box about echo chambers in itself) so perhaps you've been searching for more security-oriented things and that affects your results. In my case, the first page was mostly official Firefox links, wikipedia, and the very last result of the first page was "Google Just Gave 2 Billion Chrome Users A Reason To Switch To Firefox" so it doesn't seem like there's anything awry going on here.

I can't reproduce but I absolutely believe this has happened to you, given how much search results vary by person.

I would appreciate a screenshot if you can grab one, it would be funny to whip out in certain situations. (Doctoring a photo would be dishonest.)

That does not happen because you searched for Firefox. A dismissible popup suggesting you 'Switch to Chrome' appears if using IE to search with Google regardless of your search term.

It seems Microsoft is bit more egregious in Bing. If you search for Chrome or Firefox you get "Promoted by Microsoft - Microsoft Edge is the recommended browser for Windows 10 and it’s already installed on your PC."

...and if you change your default browser to anything else, you'll get endless "Try Edge!" messages in your notifications and even on your lock screen.

Microsoft's bad behavior does not excuse Google's bad behavior.

> IMO, during the IE6_v_FF days the feature and quality gap between browsers was at its highest. Much bigger than Chrome_v_FF ever was. Still Chrome today is far more dominant than FF ever was... except IE in its monopoly day.

The benefit needs to be worth the effort. Early on, in the days you refer to, browsers were often crappy and motivated switching often. I bounced between IE and FF a lot (and later chrome), because things were often broken/bad, or various websites I wanted to use didn't work in one or the other. However, in the last few+ years, that's not really true (in any way I notice) now.

Basically, I think the only improvements that can be made are incremental/marginal, and aren't enough to make switching browsers worth it. They're all pretty good now. So, I expect market share for browsers to change much more slowly now.

I'm afraid this time we'll need to switch before things start breaking, or otherwise less and less devs will bother testing on alternatives.

>Chrome wouldn't have gotten anywhere if it wasn't a very good browser. It is good.

It is not only good. When it came out it wiped the floor with the alternatives. Firefox 3, from that time, was absolutely pathetic in terms of performance. I remember sticking to 2 for a while. Even today Chrome is still the best, even if the margin has narrowed. Other browsers are having to adopt Blink to catch up.

Idk about wiped the floor, but it gets subjective.

Immediately before chrome launched, FF was slowly eating into IE's market share. Chrome was good, but so was FF.

I don't think chrome ever had a lead in FF anything like the lead FF had over IE. Mozilla always had to play with a disadvantage. Still do.

Was it Chrome that came up with tabs? i cant seem to remember if FF had it. If FF didnt have tabs, that is enough for me to say Chrome wiped out the competition.

Firefox had tabs before Chrome existed.

If memory serves Opera was the first browser that had tabs but they were also in Firefox by the time Chrome released.

yes, I remember Opera being first with tabs too. It was one of the main reasons people chose Opera IIRC

From Wikipedia (I first saw it using Galeon. I'm probably messing up history here but I think Epiphany was also early with tabs):

The tabbed interface approach was then followed by the Internet Explorer shell NetCaptor in 1997. These were followed by a number of others like IBrowse in 1999, and Opera in 2000 (with the release of version 4 - although a MDI interface was supported before then), MultiViews October 2000, which changed its name into MultiZilla on 1 April 2001 (an extension for the Mozilla Application Suite[8]), Galeon in early 2001, Mozilla 0.9.5 in October 2001, Phoenix 0.1 (now Mozilla Firefox) in October 2002, Konqueror 3.1 in January 2003, and Safari in 2003. With the release of Internet Explorer 7 in 2006, all major web browsers featured a tabbed interface.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)

FF had tabs. IE had already adopted them. Chrome worked a bit better with lots of tabs. Iirc, pre-chrome, a crash (usually flash) in one tab would crash the browser. Chrome fixed that.

And if birds didn't have wings, that is enough for me to say that squirrels are better at flying.

Opera was the first browser with any significant market share that supported tabs. I vividly remember switching to Opera somewhere in the 2000s for that very reason.

It also had working bookmark syncing way earlier than the others - that was the second reason for me to use Opera in the 2000-2010 timeframe. I eventually switched to Chrome when it got too good to ignore, and lately to Firefox when it got good enough to compete head-to-head with Chrome.

According to this site with a bit of link-documentation, FF was first and the Opera-claim is false.

https://allthatiswrong.wordpress.com/2011/01/14/opera-did-no...

Opera's technology may not have been tabs, but it allowed the rise of tabbed based browsing. It just used the technology of the time (having it's own windowed interface, which incidentally allowed a tab-like arrangement). It's a bit disingenuous to make the claim that Opera was not instrumental in the development of tabbed based browsing, even if it wasn't specifically using the tab technology earliest.

Anecdotal but I switched to Chrome when it came out because it's JS engine was (or at least felt) massively faster than Firefox's.

Agree.I used to use Firefox and even Opera back in the day.Then both started lagging, even opening a simple website was always with some issues.Then I thought 'OK', let's try Chrome.It was faster, more compatible with some standards and simply felt better. I don't know how Mozilla managed to screw it up so well..

> They use their other assets (search, youtube, android, docs..) to make chrome "default" option.

Don't forget their annoying bundling with freeware...

That's merely advertising. Google did not force chrome into any platform except android (which only happened after Chrome's dominance).

Mozilla could've paid for more advertising (e.g, partner up with Yahoo or some other big web property). But even with a push like that, FF won't have won because it didn't the high performance that drove Chrome's retention rate.

Tricking people into trojan-installing it shouldn't count as 'merely advertising'.

Calling it "advertising" is a understatement here. You don't end up with the product just by consuming an ad.

My parents never wanted to install Chrome. They still ended up have it. It came with an update and they didn't uncheck a checkbox. All their friends use Chrome also because of this despicable trick.

When this wave of bundled malware behavior by Google started and I had to uninstall it all over the people and family where I installed Firefox before, I stopped using it as a second browser too.

I whish someone would finally sue them for this. At least to give it the attention it should have.

> It came with an update and they didn't uncheck a checkbox

what update? Windows update? Or did they download some software, and the installer came with chrome as well?

Windows Update would have been the peak of madness...

No it was some other software where it came with the installer. I assume it was Avast as I've seen it in an update already on a different computer.

In the beginning, Chrome was bundled with Flash, and Flash was ubiquitous.

When you installed or upgraded Flash, unless you checked a checkbox, Chrome would be installed.

Funny how all it took was Steve Jobs saying "no Flash on the IPhone, it sucks" and that was the end of Flash. Thank God.

I wouldn't cheer some influential millionaire who decide it's time to kill some technology too loud. It may become a habit.

>However, their market share is not down to better browser or "some advertising."

No. Their market share is wholly due to being a better browser. That is an absolutely true statement when it comes to Windows and PC. It gets muddled with Android, because there you can make a case that they push Chrome as a default browser.

>Firefox slowly climbed to the middle, by being very good. They never got to 50% of the market.

It was a different time. FF did wonderful work with moving to a standards-based web and breaking IE hegemony, but they got blindsided by Chrome's relentless drive to squeeze every frame of performance out of JavaScript and WebKit. That's the thing with Chrome, they were not only pushing web standards forward, but more importantly they were pushing performance and security in a way that FF could not follow. Around the time that Chrome came out, FF was starting to struggle with a legacy architecture and that made it impossible for them to keep up with Chrome.

My personal experience is not what you are advertising here. I like Chrome because of the features unrelated to performance on Google's own assets - it simply has been the better browser. Yubikey support. Enterprise management capabilities. A robust extension ecosystem. Security. Better memory management for multiple tabs. Some of these are no longer a differentiator for Chrome, but Chrome got there first.

Firefox, IE, Opera have all been way late to the game on some or all of these features.

In the past I have been in the position to help make decisions on browser support at my company. We easily decided on Chrome because it was faster and more secure than IE, but more manageable than Firefox at an Enterprise level. Firefox is just starting to catch up to these feature sets. IE gave up. Safari is a literal running joke even amongst the most ardent of MacOS supporters at my company - features are simply non comparable.

I never once saw an incompatibility problem in Firefox that made me open Chrome. I currently run 2 browser sessions on my main computer - one in Firefox for personal use and one in Chrome for work use. I like and use Firefox, but Chrome has momentum.

Open Google or Youtube in Edge an you'll see a huge banner advertising Chrome. That use to happen for practically every other browser.

A company promoting their own products on their own websites is far from being criminal. Amazon.com right now just showed a giant splash for buying an Echoshow on their home page.

The difference is that Google has a near-monopoly in search. Amazon is a behemoth, but there are plenty of alternatives.

There are plenty of alternatives to Google as well.

Popularity != Monopoly

Imagine your bank, alphabank has 80% of personal bank accounts and 70% of auto insurance. When you check your transactions, you see a notice: "you could save up to x% by switching to alphacar."

That's the premise behind antitrust (even though in practice, its 50 years behind the times). If you have dominant market share, things that are otherwise lawful^ aren't anymore.

^Antitrust stuff like anti-competitive behaviour isn't criminal regardless.

That is _not_ antitrust.

It would be anti-competitive in your hypothetical if your bank refused to make transactions to your auto insurance company because it was not the bank's insurance company.

Pop-ups in your bank portal are uncomfortable but are not anti-competitive.

Oh yes, Yubikey support. Which Firefox also supports but The Almighty Google doesn't allow to use with Yubikey on their sites (same as Facebook etc.). Good job Google, that really motivated me to switch. (not)

And Firefox might be in a very different place if it wasn't tragically mismanaged to the point where every rational adviser for new computer users didn't have to say, "You can use Firefox, but these days it's slow and it's got terrible security problems."

They've turned the corner on that but it was very true for a long time, and during that time Chrome or Chromium became the default.

It is true that Google is pretty pushy with Chrome, but it's also true that FFox had years of time where it wasn't just obviously slower, it was obviously more dangerous.

I can't help but think this played a major factor in the resulting global bias towards Chrome.

> Chrome wouldn't have gotten anywhere if it wasn't a very good browser. It is good. But, I don't think it could have been that kind of wipeout without leveraging google's greater web dominance.

Google's marketing for Chrome was (and is) so aggressive that literally every single Google-owned web property asks you to install it for the "best experience." And more often than not, because Googlers never test for other browsers, Chrome does offer the best experience on Google sites. But that doesn't mean it's the best browser experience, which is a totally subjective metric based on an individual's preferences.

Regardless, Google pushed it so hard, bundled it with so much software, and threw it in users faces so much that most non-technical users probably would have ended up with it installed -- probably set to the default browser, because of more nagging -- regardless of Chrome's quality. Even now, as Google makes steps to neuter adblockers, the average user continues to use it. Why? Because they just don't know any better or care. And I can't blame them: it takes immense effort to even use Firefox now because of random sites based on Google tech that break in every other browser. Chrome is certainly the easy way out.

>In the case of Chrome, you can't blame Google. They made a good browser, did some marketing and it got popular.

Where "did some marketing" equals "unethically abused monopoly position to aggressively push through dark patterns", sure. I think I can still blame them for that.

I've seen dark patterns from Google, but in the case of Chrome I have a hard time remembering any.

Do you mean that they advertised for Chrome on their properties? Advertising on your own property is legitimate in my book. And simple advertising isn't a "dark pattern".

Or do you mean something else?

For example it used to be the case that whatever you downloaded from google or 3rd parties (google earth, picasa, oracle java etc.) automatically installed google chrome by default and set it as your default browser. This is on par with IE toolbar spamming in installers.

Many app installers, including Adobe Flash, would install Chrome along whatever they install. In the case of Flash, there was a checkbox to disable it, but if you don't pay attention, you don't see it. And I think in that case, you might even end up with Chrome as your default browser.

The most interesting part in all this is that the Adobe Flash you just downloaded and installed is not even used by Chrome, which ships its own.

I would argue the 'auto update' feature is actually a bit of a dark pattern. (I believe chrome was the first major browser to start this trend?)

It is ostensibly for security and benefits developers because of less fragmentation. But it actually hurts users in the long run because of the centralizing effect. It also enables chrome to sneak in features that users wouldn't necessarily accept.

That, and they paid money to surreptitiously bundle it with other software. Chrome is notorious for suddenly being mysteriously installed on relatives' computers: https://imgur.com/NIZk9Pd

And advertising something on your own property sure sounds reasonable, but I think it's a slightly different story when "your own property" is "the de facto homepage of the internet". That's what I meant by "abusing monopoly position".

That's not a dark pattern though. Potentially poor behavior, sure, but dark pattern, no.

"Complete your antivirus" has a pre-checked tickbox for a totally irrelevant product. And in the process agreeing to a license. That's pretty dark.

Maybe as someone with above-average technical ability this looks obvious to you. To a lot of people, it isn't. And this pattern is aimed at fooling the less technically literate.

Agreeing to a license in the EU requires an affirmative action (i.e. pre-ticked checkboxes are automatically a fail to comply)

The requirements to have unticked checkboxes predates GDPR.

It's example number two on the wikipedia page for dark patterns, Misdirection.

yes it is, dark patterns refer to user-design decissions that arguably exploit human-weaknesses. In this case human-attention span (not noticing that you have to disable this option), lazyness(it costs effor to opt-out) and human confidence in authority (I trust avast with my AV, so I trust avast not to exploit my trust (but they do)).

A big "works better in Chrome" button/banner is not legitimate advertising.

But it's the only way we marketed browsers back in '95!

The most recent thing I've seen is where the boundaries of the browser and Google's web properties start to get blurred.

For example, signing into a Google site from Chrome also signs you into the browser; it's unclear how this happens, what personal information it compromises, and more than that it's an unexpected and unwelcome surprise when it happens.

Clearing Google cookies in Chrome also doesn't work, for related reasons. Try deleting all cookies in Chrome the immediately refreshing the list: Google cookies immediately re-appear.

It's not that these things are necessarily actually dangerous. But the blurring of the line between service and user agent scares me.

>signing into a Google site from Chrome also signs you into the browser

They eventually created an option to disable that behaviour after a lot of user complaints:

"While we think sign-in consistency will help many of our users, we’re adding a control that allows users to turn off linking web-based sign-in with browser-based sign-in—that way users have more control over their experience. For users that disable this feature, signing into a Google website will not sign them into Chrome."

https://www.blog.google/products/chrome/product-updates-base...

I know many many people that had chrome installed with out them activlity seeking it out, and had their default browser changed with out their permission

So much so that many many people I know that worked on helpdesk;s at the time where getting lots of complaints about "the internet is missing" meaning their Icons changed from the IE logo to the Chrome logo because chrome was changed to the default browser with out them understanding what happened.

Add to the fact that Chrome would also install in AppData to avoid having to have Admin rights to install so it could be install on corporate/enterprise systems by normal users...

What's fine for a small business, isn't necessarily fine for a monopoly.

Seriously, every time you used to open google docs with firefox, they asked to "try&download chrome" as it was faster (or whatever). I don't have the screenshots any longer but it was so bad I added to grease monkey.

Another example: Windows: Chrome, installation being under user profile to bypass any system checks during installation process itself and further updates.

You might not have seen the dark patterns if you always used Chrome. If you browse with another browser you can observe their dark patterns daily...

Like when they deliberately cripple one of the most popular web sites for any other browser?

https://twitter.com/cpeterso/status/1021626510296285185

Yes, also see e.g.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)

Err... I don't see either of these are relevant to the Chrome situation, given that the competitors are (and have been) also free. These aren't applicable for markets of free goods and services.

Opera wasn't always free.

It became free (without ads) three years before Chrome was first released.

> that the competitors are (and have been) also free

IE was free when Netscape Navigator was a paid product.

Chrome was free when Opera was a paid product.

> Chrome was free when Opera was a paid product.

Chrome didn't exist when Opera was a paid product.

Google invested a shit ton into marketing when they launched Chrome.

I have pictures from 2012 (I think) when they had the entire grand hall of Paris' Gare de Lyon hung with dozens of huge Chrome banners.

That alone must have cost them tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of Euros.

That said I think the web's under Google's thumb screws (AMP, mail, DNS, browser-almost monopoly, etc) is in a bad place. But they did invest a hell of a lot in pushing Chrome.

Technically you are just stating facts, and I do not wish to put words into your mouth, so I am saying this with caution: if you mean to imply that "investing a shit ton into marketing" legitimizes their dominance, then I have to respectfully disagree. Economic might does not make right.

Your comment reads strangely and I can't tell what you're trying to say. I'm not sure why you frame these things as being at odds ("That said... But...). They were willing to pay to bundle Chrome with installers - it's not surprising they also invested in "conventional" marketing. And it directly led to the browser-almost-monopoly you cite.

Summarized :

They spent a ton of money on promoting Chrome But essentially defending them on that specific issue doesn't make it a nice, or admirable company in my book.

Edit, to clarify some more: I was "defending" them on some accusations that they promoted Chrome with dirty tricks and dark patterns. Initially, I'd wager, they didn't.

Does that clarify it?

Ah, I see. You were saying that because they marketed Chrome "legitimately", they probably didn't market Chrome with dirty tricks and dark patterns "at first", am I right? But I don't really think that's how it went - I think they used every trick in the book, as early and as often as possible.

If that's not true, and some marketroid in Google woke up one day and thought "hey, we could get a lot more bang for our buck by being super scummy!", then that would be an interesting tale. But it seems more likely that what happened was that Google just pulled out all the stops.

At any rate it's not much of a defense. Their "legitimate" marketing in no way absolves them for their "illegitimate" marketing.

At any rate it's not much of a defense. Their "legitimate" marketing in no way absolves them for their "illegitimate" marketing.

I think we are in general agreement here.

Spending a lot of money on legitimate marketing certainly doesn't absolve scammy tacticts at all.

One of my more recent pet peevees is their fiddling with GMail in a way that a lot of mails from external sources are flagged as spam. Even though they're sure as shit and very obviously not. And not only that. They're constantly moving the goal posts on what is "legitimate" mail.

Having such a big slice of global email this is super scummy and I really hope that (probably European, if any) regulators crack down hard on them yet again.

But I'm digressing here, I'm afraid.

"Some marketing", ha. It was prominently advertised with a message that almost made it seem required, all by itself, on the otherwise almost blank Google search page. One of the most, if not the most visited pages on the planet.

Yes I remember that too, worded with scummy, deceiving wording, like most other malware/spyware at the time.

Instead of “Virus detected! Click here for free scan” it was “Old browser detected. Click here to upgrade”.

It was literally 100% out of the malware deployment hand guide.

In this case Chrome was actually miles better and secure than those old browsers though. It wasn't deceiving, it was the truth.

Better than Chromium?

Did they show that message to Chromium users?

Purposely slowing down websites on competing browsers, breaking web-standards on cutting edge tech, abusing their other products, using slower codecs on other browsers on YT, not allowing some websites use certain features of google-doc, constantly showing popups to switch to Google Chrome on google docs - this all anti-competitive behavior to squeeze more data from your life and browsing habits.

> competitors such as Microsoft proved that they no longer have the capacity to develop a modern browser

This is incorrect. They absolutely can as demonstrated by the fact that former Edge works great, has better hardware acceleration than Chrome, and consumes less power.

However, they are not willing to anymore, which is a huge concern for future innovations in that domain.

Edge working great is quite an exageration, in my experience. Barely workable, with it's own host of weird bugs, that Microsoft did their typical slow-rolling and prevarication on handling. Tying it to a specific operating system version was also a poor decision if they wanted adoption.

"they are not willing to anymore" wtf does this mean? Have you looked at chromium commits activity? Microsoft is actively working on improving chromium, especially improving it's integration with windows 10. Convergence create synergies instead of reinventing the wheel and make Google no longer the only player in the development of chromium. Firefox has ~600000 commits Chrome has ~700000. Do you realize the order of magnitude of improvements that we users should have, if mozilla devs had worked in improving chrome instead?? No those numbers are far too much to realize for a human brain, but at least we can realize that we don't realize.

Btw hello double standards, why shouldn't QT, WPF or GTK have redundant implementations?

It is correct, but it hinges on your interpretation of the phrase "modern browser." Edge was falling behind on implementing the web spec compared to Chrome (among other things.)

> This is incorrect. They absolutely can as demonstrated by the fact that former Edge works great, has better hardware acceleration than Chrome, and consumes less power.

If Edge had all those things but could only render HTML4 and below, would it be considered a "modern browser" still? I would say no. That's an extreme hypothetical but it was similar to the future Microsoft saw for Edge, and a major factor in the switch to Chromium.

> In the case of Chrome, you can't blame Google. They made a good browser, did some marketing and it got popular.

They spammed it massively as in

- adding it to other popular downloads

- ads everywhere on their properties, including on the front page where no one else has ever been allowed to buy ad spots

- lies: would shamelessly present itself as a better browser not just for users of old IE versions but also for users of Firefox and probably Opera as well.

> In the case of Chrome, you can't blame Google. They made a good browser, did some marketing...

And paid lots of third party software vendors to bundle it as a drive-by installation 100% malware style.

There’s a good reason many of my technically inclined friends still today don’t trust Chrome.

It’s malware after all.

>I think nowadays Firefox is a much better browser and that Mozilla is better at guarding my interests, so I would use Firefox even if it weren't a better browser, however the market isn't necessarily interested in that.

Agreed. Firefox is really fast, and I love it. Been using it for a couple years now. But even if Chrome was demonstrably, objectively faster, I would still use Firefox.

Microsoft has the resources to fork Chromium if necessary, much like Google forked WebKit (after sending patches upstream for a while) and Apple forked KHTML. This is just how open source works and isn't a problem in itself.

By doing this, Microsoft gets compatibility with the world's websites on day one, and they can take it from there. It's a smart move that many people seem to be misinterpreting.

It’s a money move. Ms sunk billions in Edge. With chredge bing ads makes profits. It will come installed in windows by default.

If google’s killing ad block extensions, Microsoft will most definitely follow suite.

Your only best bet is Firefox right now.

Chrome is a Trojan horse and Google most definitely doesn’t give a shit about your privacy.

Well, even for Edge that use chromium, this situation can happen.

https://www.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/btz1lc/youtube_mat...

A lot of "third party browsers" like Opera, Vivaldi and Brave choose to go for Chromium as their engine, would they be able to use Firefox's engine the same way? If yes, why does it seem that no one actually does it? I personally don't particularly enjoy Firefox as a browser, but I don't have anything against their engine. If there was a version of Vivaldi that implemented that I would probably choose it over the Chromium version.

At the time they made those choices there were 3 main reasons to choose chromium over FF as a base

1. Smaller Size, chromium was just a smaller foot print with less legacy code

2. Better Performance. There was no doubt the before firefox quantum Chromium was the performance leader, Bink and V8 where superior then, today not soo much

3. Better rendering support. Like IE6 in the 90's today there are many many sites that ONLY work correctly on chrome, so if you use chrome's render you have less work to do, and will have less complaints by users blaming your browser for some websites poor code

More relevant: better embedding story. Gecko is not exactly great to embed.

No idea why you're downvoted: things like [0] are marked as obsolete, GtkMozEmbed et al. are basically dead, and there's no viable alternatives except when you use Android [1]. The only option is to dive deep into Thunderbird's mess of a source code and learn things the hard way, hoping Mozilla will not change things a lot in a road to post-Quantum future.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embed... [1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/GeckoView

There are browsers using Firefox's engine; most are forks of Firefox itself, but there was Camino, Conkeror, and Galeon, plus K-Meleon which is still around: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-Meleon

K-Meleon was a great option for Windows computers with not much RAM, since it used native GUI widgets instead of XUL.

(It might still be, but I haven't touched it in over a decade.)

> They made a good browser, did some marketing and it got popular

In initial days of chrome, it wasn't that better. It grew in popularity because of the bundle model of advertising they employed which was initially used to distribute spyware and the browser started growing.

All the nice things came later.

It had an uncluttered UI, multi-process tabs, sandboxing, V8, Incognito, and a few more. Some of these were available in other browsers, but the mix was rather new.

i tried firefox, and loved the experience, but ran into a few minor bugs related to css that just made absolutely no sense.

also, it regularly ran my cpu at max throttle when doing anything video-related within the browser (watching netflix, on a video chat, etc), while chrome is much more cpu-friendly with those things (don't know why that is).

I tried Opera, as well, and ran it as my main browser for months (almost a year, actually), but there is a wierd bug in windows related to the browser bar expanding when the machine wakes up from sleep, where the only way to fix it is to restart the browser entirely.

Surf works excellent: https://surf.suckless.org/

yes, because "compile webkit yourself" is super suckless

Nonsense unless your are on LFS. Your package manager does that whether it's binary or source based for every dependency for every app.

Maybe instead we can bemoan how the version of webkit in xyz repo is outdated?

>However the current situation is worrisome, because alternative implementations are dying and in the case of the web, diversity is important.

Are they though?

Adherence to standards is very good across the board. It isn't like it was in the 90s when standards were seen as mere guidelines and suggestions.

Safari is going strong. FF is going to be around but they are certainly struggling - and it's their fault. They have had the uncanny ability to make the wrong decision every time. They are hamstrung by their legacy architecture that they are just starting to break out of. Their side projects (Firefox OS, Pocket, Reality) were/are a total waste of time. And of course, they promoted and then fired Eich over nothing - which leads one to wonder what kind of a circus they run internally.

Microsoft is interesting and for now they are using a packaged version of Chromium - but I could see them do a hard-fork in the same way that Google forked WebKit because at some point a trillion-dollar company won't want to be tied to another trillion-dollar company's roadmap.

The web is a mature platform at this point, it's not really surprising everything has consolidated towards a single implementation, the economics of actually producing websites dictates that's an inevitability.

I do not trust Google, but I do not trust Mozilla either. An overwhelming majority of Mozilla funding comes from Google, Microsoft, and other giants it directly competes with. Added to that, many of it's battles (at the W3C and like) prioritize philosophy over customer satisfaction and ease of use.

99.9% of browser users don't care or don't even know if their browser is open source - what they want is convenience and ease of use. I hope Mozilla prioritizes the ones that actually matter - the users, over whatever philosophy it claims to live by, that often times isn't rooted in customer centricity.

Mozilla really hasn't helped their cause with various privacy-related issues over the last few years, like the Booking.com ads (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18800360).

The obfuscatory language around it are arguably more insulting than the ads themselves. As John Gruber so eloquently wrote:

> If you want to sell ads, sell ads. Own it. Don’t try to coat it with a layer of frosting and tell me it’s a fucking cupcake.

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2014/02/16/mozilla

They didn't sell the space to Booking.com. They've promoted one another in their user bases: Firefox showed a message about Booking, Booking showed a message about Firefox. There was no money involved.

I'm not gonna defend their action to do so because I disagree with it too, but if you wanna feel outraged about it, at least get the facts right. John Gruber should do the same.

Ironically that Gruber comment was about the "user-enhancing" Sponsored Tiles episode from early 2014. That we are still seeing questionable and un-telegraphed behavior in 2019 suggests none of the privacy-relevant lessons were taken to heart.

Excellent way of shifting the goalpost away from your stance on the Booking.com case. :)

Displaying the same ad to everyone doesn't have privacy consequences. It's why billboards aren't privacy issues, nor are the TV ads, nor ads in a magazine. Ad networks are a privacy issue, self-hosted ads are not.

A sale is a sale even if it doesn't involve hard currency. When Disney bought most of 21st Century Fox assets, there was no money involved either.

What privacy-related information was sold to booking.com again, regardless of how the transaction played out?

I get the feeling that people are asking Mozilla to simply not deal with corporations at all, regardless of privacy, which is simply impossible if it wants to survive - almost all major actors are corporations, so the alternative is Mozilla turning into a shut-in.

If you want influence, you're going to need to deal. And sure, there are deals conceivable that represent giving up on principles for short term gain. But just because it's possible to conceive of a deal that's "selling out", doesn't mean every deal represents selling out.

I mean in this very same comment thread another poster is complaining how principled Mozilla is @ the w3c.

Suffocating Mozilla (regardless of whether you use/admire/detest/ignore Firefox) under impossible expectations is likely a permanent loss for users. There are precious few organizations like it with any influence that are advocating for the individual in web tech, so once Mozilla dies (which seems likely, at this point), whatever tech firm special-interests can get away with is going to happen. And as modern politics should make clear: there's not a lot of reasonableness left with which to restrain actors like that once things turn political.

Sorry, I didn't make it clear: I was arguing that point alone, not claiming they sold private data or anything else.

Really pathetic to see people here defending Mozilla putting ads on the home page of the browser.

What do you think of when the Mozilla Corporation sent the browsing history of users by default to a third party advertisement company?

>Users who receive a version of Firefox with Cliqz will have their browsing activity sent to Cliqz servers, including the URLs of pages they visit.

https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-i...

Yes, but they also made moves that are against Google's interests, repeatedly. If you have better ideas on how to monetize a browser, I'm sure they are open to suggestions.

As for their "battles at the W3C", you mean DRM and H.264, the patent-encumbered video codec?

The philosophy you're talking about is probably why they still have that 5% of the market, otherwise they would be irrelevant ;-)

I dont believe Mozilla prioritizes their philosophy enough, they are tooo quick to cave in in the name of "customer centricity" instead of standing up for the Open Web which is and should be the SOLE reason they exist

Mozilla Foundation is a Non-profit foundation who mission to the ensure the web is open and accessible to all, not to make the most commercially successful web browser

If nobody uses their browser and nobody contributes to their project, then the point of defending an open web is kinda moot.

It's not the hill I want Mozilla's philosophy to die on because if they do (and they will if they do as you ask), then there is no point to it. The open web dies to thundering applause from Google employees.

Same result if they cave in to everything Google does in lock step with them as they do today?

I fail to see how having FireFox around has a Chrome Clone is in anyway different

Mozilla does plenty to differentiate from Chrome and does a lot of work to increase privacy for web users. They have to make compromises in places to make sure they are relevant enough to push privacy elsewhere. (And of course there is lots of google shilling to spread paranoia about Mozilla).

As an individual, I want "convenience and ease of use". But I'm not blind to the fact that you're going to get shafted because my negotiating position - as an individual - is poor. So I 100% want an organization like mozilla, that does have at least some influence (but let's not get too hopeful here), to prioritize also the longer term benefits you describe as "philosophy".

Otherwise you're basically giving in to eternal serfdom; letting large corporations dictate the terms, knowing that individuals will never be able to extract the long-term compromises needed for a good deal. It's basic negotiating 101 that the party holding all the cards is going to get most of the value.

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